Author's Comments

One day, in the middle of my senior year of college, I
decided to write a book. I'd written a few things before.
Nothing so complex as an actual short story (aside from
a few five-hundred-word shorts for various high-school
assignments and one memorably bad story I'd written in
German in lieu of a report), but scenes and scraps of dialogue.
I'd never met an author, never gone to an SF convention,
when I set out to write this book. And for the next
few years I wrote, and rewrote, the first ten pages of my
novel. Those ten pages, I might add, are the first thing I cut
for this edition. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the
night and find myself muttering those lines: The great hall
of the castle was his favorite room . . .

With our newly minted degrees, my husband and I set
out for the wilds of Chicago, where Mike had taken a job as
an aquarist with the John G. Shedd Aquarium (we do seem
to have had a lot of interesting if not lucrative careers, my
husband and I) and I began working at an insurance office.
The Greater Chicago area had seven and a half million
people. My home state of Montana (in the 1990s) had eight
hundred thousand people'in the whole state. Suddenly
my manuscript represented more than a challenge — it was
an escape. Don't get me wrong, I loved Chicago — I just
didn't love living with seven and a half freaking million
people.

We stayed a full year before culture shock sent us racing
homeward, and about that time, somewhat to my surprise,
I had finished the book.

I knew that I knew nothing about writing a book when
I started it. So I took those things I did know and stuck
with them. The plot, my patient husband pointed out, had
been done before'but I was okay with that. The important
thing to me was that I'd actually finished the book. It
shocked and amazed me when the book actually sold.

Masques, when it came out, was what my husband likes
to call an extremely limited edition. That's husband speak
for “It sold very poorly.” Fortunately, before my publisher
figured out just how poorly it had done, they'd bought Steal
the Dragon as well. My second book, blessed by a terrific
Royo cover and a writer who had figured out a little more
about writing, did a lot better than the first. Masques went
out of print the month Steal the Dragon came out back in
1995, and hasn't been in print since.

Years passed by, my career started to pick up, and
Masques started to command higher prices on the secondary
market. If I had a box of twenty-four copies left, I
could sell them on eBay for more than I sold the publication
rights for the original novel.

With that in mind, I took out the unpublished sequel,
Wolfsbane, blew off the dust, and did an extensive polishing
run. I sent the result to my editor and asked about
reprinting Masques and publishing Wolfsbane. She agreed
and asked me if I wanted to revise Masques before they
released it. Absolutely, I said. Please. And that was about
the time I got a call asking me if I'd like to try my hand at
an urban fantasy first. With the subsequent success of the
Mercy Thompson and Alpha and Omega novels, Masques
and Wolfsbane got put on the back burner for a few years.

Finally, I had a bit of breathing room and sat down for
the first time in a decade or so and started reading Masques.
I had intended to do a brief polishing run. I read the first
chapter (squirming uncomfortably all the way through)
and turned to my husband. “By golly,” I said (or words to
that effect). “Why didn't someone tell me I needed to use a
few descriptions?”

When I wrote Masques, I was in my twenties and hadn't
even finished a short story worthy of the name. I knew
nothing about writing. The only tool I had in my craftbox
was that I loved the fantasy genre and had read a lot of
books. Twenty years later, I've written more than fifteen
books, discussed/argued writing with a number of enormously
skilled craftspeople — and learned a lot in the process.
But that same experience also means I could not write
Masques now.

Thus, fixing the book and still allowing it to be the same
story, my first story, became quite a problem.

In the end, Masques and I have come to a compromise.
Though I have added a bit to the beginning, I have not
taken away any of the original pieces of the story (much
as it sometimes pained me). I just fit those pieces together
a little better. I left in most of the clich's and the oddities
that, if I were editing an unpublished work, I would have
removed. Thus, I hope, that those few of you who read the
original and remember it fondly will feel as though this is
an expanded version of the same story. And those of you
who are only familiar with my later, more polished work
won't be disappointed.